…A very frazzled me. It’s been a rough week. Last Friday I got Soolin. She’s gorgeous and an absolute blast, but she places HUGE demands on my time. To give you a sense of it, I haven’t played a single videogame since I got her, and I’ve read less than 50 pages in the novel I’m working on. Meanwhile I had an opportunity Monday to present to a large group of Skidmore faculty for the first time which I was a bit apprehensive about (it all went well) and spent a ton of time preparing for, and then this coming Monday classes start so I had a ton of prep work for the upcoming semester. All this adds up to an extremely busy and frazzled me, with no time to play, post to my weblog, or exercise. It’s all worth it of course, the dog is a joy and despite some launch of semester troubles things went well enough that most faculty are both content and all set. I’ll post some pictures of Soolin this weekend in the gallery and perhaps catch up on some posts I wanted to make here, I’ve got email to deal with first though, and a dog to walk every hour or so, today in potentially -20 degree blizzard conditions.
Awesome wall treatments
I’ve mentioned a few times how much I like Mocoloco.com. Recently they posted a piece about some beautiful wall treatments by an artist named Jennifer Prichard. Check out the photos – she hand throws porcelain shapes and then affixes them by the thousands to walls in very organic looking shapes. It’s excellent stuff, I’d love to have a wall in my house get a treatment like this.
In praise of adium
I’ve been using Gaim on windows as my instant messenging client for several years now. For quite a while now there have been some unfortunate bugs in the user-interface which have something to do with Windows and the windowing toolkit Gaim uses (GTK I think). Anyway the long and short is I haven’t been particularly happy with it lately. Over Christmas holiday my brother showed me the latest Adium. I’d tried it a couple of times in the past and while there were things I liked about it, it was very crash-prone and I never seriously considered switching to it. Until now that is. Whatever was causing all the crashing seems to be gone – no crashes so far in a couple of weeks of use. It’s got an excellent, very customizable interface, it’s based on the same libraries as gaim so its compatibility with the various IM engines is very high, and it’s got some clever scripting hooks built in. It’s mac-only, sorry windows folk, but well worth a look if you’re on that platform. It’s caused me to move my IM stuff off of the PC altogether, home and work.
Wealthy siblings take note –
My birthday is in March. I’m giving you forewarning now so you can begin saving. As you know, I like gaming, and I am an exercise nut. As you also know, I’ve been waiting for the perfect peripheral to combine these interests, and have blogged a number of candidates over the years, and I’ve been using a dance mat and playing DDR lately despite how foolish I feel doing it. Now there’s an even better candidate which recently won an award at the CES in Las Vegas – the Kilowatt. It uses the principle of isometrics to give your muscles a workout, and works with any game, on all platforms. I so want one of these. They’re also going to make an attachment for it that adds an exercise bike onto it.
I’m kidding about it as a birthday gift of course (it’s $1200 plus shipping), though I do really want one, and if I can swing it $$$-wise and the exercise bike attachment comes out I will in fact get one. There was also more promising news from CES in this regard, as Konami bought a struggling exercise chain in Japan and is releasing a set of products related to software and hardware they’re installing in the chain, things like attachments for your existing exercise bike, games aside from dancing that work with your dance pad, and more. Seems like a small niche of interest to me is expanding, which is of course great from my perspective.
Thinking about HDTV?
Many (most?) folks aren’t aware that there’s a lot of free, over the air (as in, not cable) broadcast content these days available in HDTV. Most folks also aren’t aware that over the air broadcasts for HDTV work tons better than the old rabbit ears from the 1970’s we all remember from our youth. If you’ve been eyeing those Time Warner or other cable company ads where they’re trying to sell you a new cable box and additional monthly services, consider trying a small antenna and trying the broadcast stuff first – football, a lot of the main primetime broadcast tv shows (CSI, for example, not that I am a fan), and a lot of PBS programming is already out there for you too see, for free. And if you think you’re too remote for these broadcasts to reach you, consider this: I’m totally in the boonies and I get 6 channels. Then use antennaweb.org (note that you don’t have to tell them any of the info they ask for – just use your zip and you are all set) to check your location and see what channels you can get. You don’t even need an HDTV set, you just need a tuner and a computer with DVI-in and you can watch and record the content.
If you don’t yet have a tuner, consider picking one up before June of 2005. That’s when the FCC has mandated that HDTV tuners must have Broadcast Flag support built in, meaning any devices sold after this June will be crippled – HBO can, for example, set their programming such that you can’t record the Sopranos if you’re tuning it using a Broadcast Flag-enabled device. So buy your tuners now (they start at around $200) as a hedge against the shenanigans you are going to see later this year. Not that I don’t think we’ll see hacks to get around this bullshit, but they won’t be for the average consumer, you’re better off just buying a tuner now.
Some praise for flyingmeat
It’s human nature to bitch about things, and I’m as guilty of it as anyone is on their blog, so to mix things up, some praise – Voodoopad, from flyingmeat software, kicks ass. A desktop wiki engine with a free server script that’s trivial to get running. If you’re the kind of person who has sticky notes everywhere, you need this app. $25, worth every penny. Mac only. My life is pouring into this little app as fast as I can type.
What I’ve been up to
Well, it’s been a couple of days. First, I’ve been sick. Some kind of stomache flu. I ingest, it comes back up within 30 minutes or so. Not fun. Fortunately it’s very slow at work so I could take today off and be more comfortable at home. I did have to go to work for several meetings yesterday though and was miserable. I managed to leave around 2PM at least.
You might have noticed it was awfully quiet around here over the holidays. While part of this was simply a function of the season, and part of this was because I got World of Warcraft and couldn’t drag myself away from it, part of it was also that I expended a lot of geek energy building a machine to replace the server hosting my web stuff. This was precipitated by the fact that comment spammers were destroying my site and there was no clean path to fixing this. I’d actually been planning to migrate boxes for quite a while – in fact I bought the replacement box well over a year ago – but between changing jobs, moving, and the complexities of migrating all my content I never managed to get around to it. Err, that is, until now. The new box is in fact up and running in a very preliminary fashion. Many (many!) things are still broken, some very badly, but it’s functional at this point. There were a number of issues I had to get over or which are still troubling me, to wit: (click to read the full post, it’s rather long)
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Why big media is retarded
So tivo has launched its new tivo to go software, which allows you to download shows you’ve recorded to your tivo onto your pc so you can watch them on other devices (a laptop for when you’re on the road, for example). Except. Except they’ve crippled it, you have to use encryption keys to access your own recordings, and you can’t share them with others (at peril of having your Tivo account deactivated), and you are not able to encord some cable channels, which are maintained at Tivo’s discretion. HBO being one example. So Tivo, tell me why the hell I would pay you for such a device, when I can go get these recordings off the net restriction free, or when I can use my snapstream box to record the shows myself, restriction free, then move them wherever I like in whatever format I like?
The answer is – I won’t pay Tivo, and you shouldn’t either. Can you imagine how the VCR would have gone over if it had been encumbered with such crap? I’m sure the hacker community will crack their protections but no corporation should be rewarded with your $$$’s for so completely failing to recognize the sea change that’s taking place. I’m aware that Tivo is trying to walk a fine line and they’re terrified they’ll be sued into extinction by big media if they don’t build in restrictions like this, but they’re going to go under anyway with half-assed offerings like this.
Eat your curries
New research suggests that eating curry regularly is more effective at preventing the onset of Alzheimers than any current drug regimen. The article I’m linking to also notes that India has one of the lowest incidences of Alzheimers globally. I found this on the excellent boingboing.net. Hamiltons of the Yule extraction should make note of this and eat your curries – it’s in your genetic makeup, which we know from our great grandparents, so get busy with the indian food.
If an ad blinks in the background, does anyone see it?
Or more specifically, is the thing eating cpu cycles on my computer? Say you visit a site and it’s got several of those wonderful attention grabbing blinking ads from hell. ESPN has them for example, as does Bluewsnews and the IMDB on occasion. They’re all over the place, really. The definitely eat cpu cycles on my machines, especially on the Mac if they’re flash based, you can actually see the slowdown of the browser’s ability to scroll when they’re on screen. My question then – if the browser is minimized or occluded by some other app’s screen or the finder or whatever, and the screen with the ad is not visible, is it still eating cpu cycles? Intuition would say not, but some testing on my laptop was inconclusive. Anyone know? Lacking a working commenting system you’ll have to IM me if you know the answer, or email me to one of the addresses on my contact page.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 